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Thursday, August 18, 2016

New Chapter for an Old Car

For the last 3 years I've been working on resurrecting a beat-up 2000 Impreza 2.5 RS Coupe. It's had quite the transformation from rust bucket to rallycross champ. I've really grown attached to the car in that short time, but I've come to slowly realize that I need a cleaner car. By clean, I mean not 16 years of rust and rot and neglect and patchwork body repairs. However, finding a suitable replacement here in the midwest has been nearly impossible. These older Subarus have not survived the harsh winters and even harsher chemicals put on roads here in Nebraska. Rusty quarter panels seems to be as sure of a thing as leaky head gaskets on these old Subies.

However, I've managed to find a suitable replacement to swap a few things over and continue to grow and improve with. Hidden away in Washington State I managed to find a 1999 Impreza 2.5 RS Coupe... same color and everything, just no rust. In fact, the car is in awesome shape and is more than ready to take up the mantle of my previous project car. However, the story of this RS Coupe has a more interesting start than that.

I've been following Agatino Fortunato since the beginning of the 2016 Rally America Series back in January. Tino and the All Fours Rally Team have a Super Production WRX STI that they compete with and I was lucky enough to meet them at the Rally in the 100 Acre Wood earlier this year. Instead of trucking the Impreza here and fixing the head gaskets on the '99 Impreza, I got in touch with Tino. By some strange force of nature, they're going to button it all back up and drive it on it's maiden voyage to Ojibwe Forests Rally next week! Now all I've gotta do is quit geeking out, make some plans, and meet them there to drive my new rally car home!

I wish I could attend the whole rally, but I have to work that Saturday. I'll be hitting the road, driving through the night to make it there, get some rest, check out some of the rally, get the car, and head home with it. What an adventure I've got coming! I'm pretty stoked to have this cool of a story linked to a car I'll be picking up. What a way to start a new project!

2 comments:

I can tell you from experience that if you still want to restore the 2000 Impreza 2.5 RS Coupe, you will be investing your money wisely. I have one and it just had a complete overhaul done to it. We made it to 200,000 miles and now we should easily hit 300,000 without having to spend hardly anything above gas and maintenance.

Restoring the '00 Coupe that I had would've been an uphill battle with rust. The '99 one I picked up is a much better car to hang on to for a long time given the care that was taken to keep it in good shape up to this point.